Who was the most successful Irish-American woman?
In my book, she was a fugitive, a prisoner, vivacious, beloved, despised, and competitive.
She continually challenged church, state, and the mulishness of men. She was married twice, had many partners, enjoyed sex into her 80s, and set out to change society upon watching her tubercular Irish-born mother die at age 49 after 11 childbirths and 7 miscarriages.
In short, she believed that every woman should have the right to decide how many children to have, while still enjoying sex.
Margaret Sanger aka Maggie Higgins with her children.
Her name was Margaret Sanger, known to her oldest friends as Maggie Higgins.
Margaret Louise Higgins was born in Corning, New York in 1879. She was the sixth of the eleven surviving children of Michael and Anne Purcell Higgins.
Both parents had emigrated from Ireland in the years following the Great Hunger. Michael “Marble” Higgins was a stonecutter and a free thinker.
Though times were tough, there was no shortage of books in the Higgins household. Maggie was bright, and after her elder sisters paid her way through high school she studied nursing at White Plains Hospital. There she contacted TB but married William Sanger, an architect.
Against medical advice, she managed to have two children, but when their fine house in Westchester burned down, the family moved to New York City.
Both she and William became members of the mainly middle-class Socialist Party. She worked as a nurse in the fetid immigrant slums of the Lower East Side, and was appalled at the unsanitary conditions, and how women were forced to deal with frequent childbirth, miscarriages and self-induced abortions.
She became a member of the International Workers of the World (The Wobblies) and forged a strong bond with another second-generation Irish-American, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
Flynn’s father was also a stonecutter, and even more of a free-thinker. Together, these two fiery young women became leaders of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lowell, Massachusetts and won a great victory for the impoverished textile workers.
However, a year later, they rushed into a poorly financed strike in Patterson, New Jersey, and were no match for the power and resources of Wall Street and the Silk industry.
Despite rising political and industrial agitation nationwide, it became apparent to Sanger that there could be no real societal change while women were unable to plan their pregnancies.
Contraception was illegal and, with few exceptions, doctors wanted no part of it. She began challenging the Comstock Act by mailing information on contraception through her magazine, "The Woman Rebel." Sentenced to jail, she escaped to England at the outbreak of World War I.
While there, she learned more about European methods of contraception and before she returned to the U.S. to serve her sentence, she arranged to import diaphragms. In 1916, Sanger, along with her sister Ethel Byrne, opened the first American birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
It was an immediate success with the local Jewish and Italian immigrant women.
But nine days later, the sisters were arrested. Byrne went on a 185-hour hunger strike before being force-fed, the first American woman to face such a fate. The case became a national sensation.
Byrne was pardoned, and Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised not to break the law again. When she refused she was sent back to jail.
But in 1918, a New York Court of Appeals ruled that New York doctors could offer contraceptives to their patients. This victory caused many donors to open their purses to the growing birth control movement.
Sanger became a household name while challenging authorities in searing speeches across the country.
She formed Planned Parenthood and many millions of women have since availed of its services. She did not favor abortion, feeling that if contraception was available, there would be little need for it.
She led a long contentious life always promoting feminist issues.
She married a wealthy industrialist, James Noah Snee, who subsidized her causes as she moved easily through all strata of society, but her greatest wish was that every woman should have easy access to affordable contraceptives.
This happened shortly before her death in 1966 when contraceptives were finally declared legal for married couples, and the long hoped for birth control pill became universally available.
After watching her mother’s exhausted death, the dream of the stonecutter’s daughter became a reality for Maggie Higgins, arguably the most successful Irish-American woman.
